The World Federation of Trade Unions, representing more than 105 million workers who work live, and struggle in 133 countries all over the world, strongly condemns the continuation of military interventions and wars, the accelerated militarization of international relations and confrontational rhetoric, the soaring of the military expenditures, as well as the NATO plans amid the escalating intra-imperialist confrontation. The 2024 ΝΑΤΟ summit which will take place in Washington D.C. on 9-10-11 July 2024, constitutes one more step toward the intensification of NATO’s aggressive imperialist plans, interventions, and wars.

NATO has already announced an increase of its military budget for 2024 by 12% to 2.03 billion euros and its civil budget by 18.2% to 438.1 million euros increasing even more the operating capacity of NATO Command Structure headquarters, missions, and operations around the world. This year’s figures confirm the continuation of an at least 10 years-long course of moving towards a “war economy” for the member states of NATO, with NATO’s Secretary General emphasizing that “burden sharing is improving within NATO” while military spending is up 18 percent across European Allies and Canada in 2024, and 23 member states will spend at least 2% of GDP in military spending this year.

The International class-oriented trade union movement unequivocally condemns the war plans of the imperialists and strongly opposes the uninterrupted increase of the NATO budget which sharpens even more the confrontation and deepens the preparations and the risk for a generalized imperialist conflict with disastrous consequences for the popular strata and the ordinary people who always pay the cost of the imperialist antagonism.

NATO’s history demonstrates nothing but interventions, wars, juntas, refugees, starvation, destruction, and death. In addition, the continued soaring in military spending constitutes a provocation for the people who constantly see their living standards affected due to generalized price rises, inflation, and long-term austerity policies.

The militant class-oriented trade union movement intensifies the struggle against imperialist wars and the system that creates them. The WFTU fights for the dissolution of NATO which constitutes an aggressive war machine in service of the imperialist interests of its member states, aiming to maintain, and expand if possible, the existing favorable correlation of forces for the NATO countries in order to safeguard the profits of their monopolies.

Simultaneously we reiterate our firm demand for the immediate dissolution of all military coalitions, the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, an immediate end to all imperialist armed conflicts, and full respect for the sovereignty, independence, and right of every people to freely choose their present and future. We denounce the exclusions, discriminations, embargoes, and sanctions imposed by the US, NATO, and the EU against various countries, negatively impacting the standard of living of low-income families, workers, poor small farmers, and popular strata in general.

The WFTU calls upon workers all over the globe, the militant trade unions to join the ranks and the struggles of the international class-oriented trade union movement for lasting peace, for a world free of imperialist interventions and man-by-man exploitation.

#WFTU #NATO #EU #Militarization #Imperialism #Exploitation #Peace #Labor #TradeUnion

Porto, Portugal – At an event in Porto on July 4 attended by around 200 people, leaders of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) firmly condemned the privatization of a key state energy company, Efacec, to a German shareholder. Mutares, the German shareholder, submitted a bid to acquire a 71% ownership of the currently nationalized company that specializes in transformers, appliances and equipment, automation solutions and electric mobility.

The Communist Party leaders who spoke at the event said that this new privatization would deepen the process of deindustrialization and have a serious impact on the country's financial situation, negatively impacting the working class.

Paulo Raimundo, general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, spoke at the event in Porto, condemning the privatization and announcing actions the Communist Party will take to try to stop it. One action he said the party will take is that its members who are elected to the Assembly of the Republic will present a resolution there to try to block the imminent privatization.

Privatization and other harms inflicted on the Portuguese economy by multinational capital have resulted in one in five people leaving Portugal to work in richer countries – the highest emigration rate in the European Union.

#PortoPortugal #Porto #Portugal #EU #PCP #Europe

Farage, who recently resigned as UK Independence Party leader, and some of the other racist Leave campaigners, including former London Mayor Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party, stirred up hatred against immigrants in general, and Muslim refugees in particular. And the media dutifully ate it up, magnifying the racist voices and ignoring the many anti-racist worker organizations, trade unions, and community groups that supported Britain’s exit from the EU on progressive grounds.

By doing so, the media stoked the flames of national chauvinism and distracted from the class content of the anti-EU sentiment that had already reached a boiling point among British workers well before the Farage and Johnson circus stormed Britain on their anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim crusade.

The situation has only been exacerbated by the fact that the Labour Party, including its embattled leader, Jeremy Corbyn, abandoned Britain’s working class and ceded the debate for leaving the EU to reactionary forces by campaigning to remain in the EU contrary to the clear interests of the British working class. If Corbyn, an extraordinarily progressive figure in modern Labour Party politics, had hoped that campaigning to remain in the EU would buy him the support of more conservative Labour leaders who otherwise oppose his leadership, he now knows he was sorely mistaken. Corbyn unfortunately lost a no confidence vote by a margin of 172 to 40 among his fellow Labour lawmakers following the vote to exit the EU, according to the New York Times.

The media, through its collusion with the likes of Farage and Johnson, is responsible for the increased incidents of racist attacks in Britain, including the shocking assassination of Jo Cox, a Labour member of parliament (MP) who, despite her support for imperialist intervention in Syria, vocally supported immigration. It is no surprise in this context that many Black, Asian and Muslim voters cast their ballot to remain in the EU out of fear that a vote to exit was a vote for a racist, anti-immigrant backlash against their communities.

By framing the vote as a referendum on immigration and dividing the working class anti-austerity vote, the media served the interests of the majority of British capitalists who wished to remain in the EU. According to polling by the Confederation of British Industry, it almost worked.

While all of this shows the need to shift the struggle to the capitalists in their own country, none of it negates the fact that many British workers left the EU because they rejected the continuance of austerity. And none of it negates the fact that in voting to leave, British workers are weakening the EU.

Weakening the imperialist European Union is objectively progressive

Britain is an imperialist country and historic colonial power whose empire once extended to, and exploited, almost one-quarter of the world’s population and one-quarter of the earth’s total land mass, according to Al Jazeera. The European Union is a collection of imperialist countries and historic colonial powers whose empires, kingdoms, and republics once extended to, and exploited, the whole world over with the rare exception of a few countries such as Ethiopia, according to information from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire.

A 2012 report by the European Commission identified German, Italian, English, French and Spanish as the dominant languages of the EU. Add to this Portuguese and Dutch and it becomes a veritable Who’s Who of languages for colonizers and slave traders. The imperialist character of the individual EU member states is strengthened by the European Union, not weakened by it.

The EU compels austerity against its own member states, including smaller nation-states such as Ireland and Greece, as French and German capital, particularly German, seek hegemony within the Union. The EU has also proved itself a force for imperialist war, not peace. It has avoided another ‘Great War’ following World War II and instead has helped ensure that the imperialist powers making up the EU consistently point their guns at their former colonies instead of at each other.

Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom (among other EU member states) have all remained in NATO throughout the history of the EU. All of these countries participated in the NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, according to BBC News. Many participated in the invasion of Iraq and continue to support intervention in countries such as Libya and Syria.

Breaking up this united imperialist front, which provides little except austerity for workers at home and war and occupation for workers in the oppressed countries that EU countries formerly colonized, is objectively progressive. There is no evidence of any child living in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Iran losing sleep over Britain’s exit from the EU. A united Europe with guns pointed at these children is the main danger the oppressed nations face from the various European imperialist powers.

There is evidence that the courage of Britain’s working class in turning its back on austerity is having positive anti-imperialist ripple effects throughout the EU. The most obvious is that it has reignited the possibility of an exit from the EU by other member states, which would further weaken imperialist unity in Europe. The Washington Post identifies Greece, Sweden, Hungary, Netherlands, Denmark and France as additional countries where referendums to exit the EU are now most likely to gain new momentum.

As in Britain, the anti-EU sentiment in these countries is full of contradictions and there is a right-left divide as to the rationale for the exit with a strong progressive sentiment against austerity, especially in Greece, mixed in with a resurgent nationalist right wing that seeks to de-class the anti-EU struggle with appeals to national chauvinism and ‘country first’ politics. According to German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Dimitris Papadimoulis, leader of the Syriza party in the European Parliament, which firmly opposed Britain’s exit from the EU, acknowledged the risk of EU dissolution saying, “The left should be standing firm on this big challenge as neoliberal and austerity policies have completely failed. The EU must change: Otherwise, it will face the risk of dissolution.”

Much attention has rightly been paid to the racist nature of British resistance to the EU’s liberal immigration rules. It is certainly xenophobic and backward when an imperialist country resists immigration of almost any sort. However, telling only this part of the story fails to account for the racist nature of the EU’s own immigration rules. According to the Telegraph, EU rules discriminate against non-European immigrants by granting only EU citizens an automatic right to live in another EU member state.

Recently, the EU has been accused of killing by neglect after 400 refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea drowned in the Mediterranean Sea when their boat capsized, according to the Independent. The tragedy comes after EU policymakers, who treat the migrant crisis as a border security issue, cut rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

The fact that racists like Nigel Farage and a substantial minority of British capitalists support leaving the EU does not negate the objectively progressive nature of weakening the EU. The same holds true in the U.S. when it comes to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to a 2014 report for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, NAFTA has cost at least 845,000 U.S. working-class jobs, primarily in manufacturing. Meanwhile, food prices have spiked and real wages have fallen in both the U.S. and Mexico. A minimum wage earner in Mexico today can afford 38% fewer consumer goods as on the day that NAFTA took effect

Communist organizations, leftist writers, and labor unions in the U.S. almost uniformly oppose NAFTA. So did (and does) crypto-fascist Pat Buchanan, the runner-up in the 1992 Republican presidential primary. Today, Donald Trump, a racist and xenophobe on par with Britain’s Nigel Farage, also claims to oppose NAFTA and support a withdrawal or renegotiation of that treaty. The opposition of NAFTA by racists like Buchanan and Trump has never necessitated a change in the left’s opposition to NAFTA, and it does not do so now.

The objective interests of the working class and the oppressed dictate support for a withdrawal from NAFTA, much the same as they dictate support for any country’s withdrawal from the EU.

Organizations of workers and the oppressed in Europe strongly support British exit from EU

Communist parties in Britain are overwhelmingly united in their consistent support of the right of the British working class to exit the EU. The Communist Party of Britain, Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), New Communist Party of Britain, Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and many other British socialist and communist organizations all rejected the false choice between national chauvinism on the one hand and capitulation to EU austerity on the other hand.

The communist and socialist parties were joined by unions and other progressive organizations, including the Indian Workers Association (GB) and the Bangladeshi Workers Council of Britain. No one is more aware of the dangers of British national chauvinism than the Indian and Bangladeshi people, who have experienced extreme national oppression at the hands of British imperialism as former colonies subject to direct British Crown Rule from 1858 to 1947. Today, Bangladeshi and Indian workers living in Britain face the daily racist discrimination, living as immigrants and the descendants of immigrants in the same country their former colonial rulers call home. Yet these two important organizations of the nationally oppressed living in Britain joined with other progressive forces to campaign for Britain’s exit from the EU.

The progressive Leave voices in Britain are bolstered by the many communist and workers’ organizations across Europe that enthusiastically support the historic decision by Britain’s working class to abandon the EU’s austerity regime. The Communist Party of Ireland, Communist Party of Greece, Portuguese Communist Party, Communist Party (Switzerland), Communist Party, Turkey, New Communist Party of the Netherlands, and New Communist Party of Yugoslavia are among those issuing strong statements of encouragement to the British organizations that successfully stood up to austerity while refusing to cave to racism, national chauvinism or xenophobia.

Left Leave forces in Britain project progressive vision, take on capitalist racism and reaction at home

Britain’s working class organizations are stepping up the fight at home against the capitalist regime based in London, which serves the interests of British finance capital just as the EU served German and French (and British) finance capital.

While their voices were drowned out by the media focus on the racist and xenophobic forces, the anti-austerity perspective and vision for a progressive future won over many of the working class voters who supported the decision to leave the EU. In its analysis of the need for British workers to exit the EU, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) discussed the fact that British workers have enemies on both sides, meaning the perpetrators of austerity in the EU as well as the racists and capitalists at home in Britain, and articulated a vision for exiting the EU that would both secure workers’ rights and weaken all imperialist rulers, including the British ruling class.

Many of the organizations supporting the British exit from the EU have called for the mobilization of progressive forces in Britain to defend immigration and to transform the country into a safe haven for refugees. There have also been widespread calls for campaigns, street mobilizations and industrial actions against privatization, war and anti-worker trade deals.

A coalition of communist and socialist parties, trade unions and progressive issue-based groups have called for a mass emergency demonstration on July 16. The coalition, many of whose members supported leaving the EU, is raising demands against austerity and racism at home. Specifically, the coalition is demanding consolidation of banking institutions into a publicly owned banking system, increased taxes on the rich, a 35-hour workweek, a program to build 250,000 new social homes each year, an end to privatization of public services, and increased unionization.

The media can, and may, continue to ignore the progressive dimensions of the left forces that fought to leave the EU on an anti-austerity basis. But that doesn’t make the left’s analysis any less impactful, their demands any less just, or their appeal to a large section of Britain’s working class any less powerful. And it doesn’t make breaking up the EU anything less than objectively progressive.

#WashingtonDC #Brexit #EU #Europe

To the misfortune of the EU elite the British people voted for a withdrawal from the European Union.

The stock markets of finance capital fell, the Brussels bureaucrats are tearing their hair out over the subjects' disobedience and David Cameron, who made the fateful choice to let the people be heard has now fallen on his own grip and is forced to resign.

Opponents of EU in all countries should rejoice when the ruling classes of the European Union are shaken in its foundations. What will happen in the coming weeks is difficult to predict. How EU elite will deal with the current situation even themselves they do not know.

However, what is clear is that the gap between the elites and the people is enormous, as is the people’s contempt of the elites.

The liberals and the EU elites contempt for the people have an obedient agitator in Swedish Liberal MP Birgitta Ohlsson who believes that David Cameron ”opened Pandora's box when he made the announcement that a referendum would be held”.

Pandora's box contained according to the Greek ancient mythology all the world's woes, accidents, combats and diseases. To let the people be heard is, according to Ohlsson, the same as placing this misery in the world.

The construction of the EU superpower is too important. There are too many major political and economic values (read profits) at stake to take the risk that the people will put a spoke in the wheel. Birgitta Ohlsson is a master of draping her support for big power politics in democratic formalwear – whether it is bombing Iraq or defending the power in Washington or Brussels – but now the Empress is naked with here popular discontent in the open.

Adjacent to Brexit Swedish state television SVT did an opinion poll on the on EU in Sweden. It turned out that more than half of Swedes would vote for a continued EU membership if it were a referendum today and over 30 percent would vote for Svexit.

Swedish state television chose to use these figures to say that there is a strong support for EU among the Swedish people. SVT says that the 52 percent who want to remain in the EU is a ”strong support”, while at the same the tv channel called the British vote, 52 percent for Brexit, for a marginal victory that divide Britain. Media's pro-EU propaganda is indeed deplorable.

The poll should rather be interpreted as the opposite.

The fact that nearly a third of the Swedes would vote for secession from EU if there were a referendum today is a sign of strength. Given the fact that the whole economic, political and media elite is united behind the EU. Given the fact that we are daily fed with biased EU positive propaganda. Given the fact that no parliamentary party is actively pushing the issue of Sweden to leave the EU.

Just over half of the Swedes say they would vote to continue our membership. After over 20 years of membership in EU and with the massive propaganda this is nothing more than a failure for the European elite.

Unfortunately the Left Party and its chairman Jonas Sjöstedt, which previously were a major force in the Swedish opposition against EU, have choosen not to support Svexit. After the victory of Brexit Sjöstedt instead once again demands that the Swedish EU membership should be renegotiated.

Sjöstedt’s betrayal of Svexit weakens the struggle for a Swedish exit of EU and leaves the matter in the hands of extreme right party Sweden Democrates (SD).

All opponents of EU in and around the Left has to raise their voices and protest against the act of Sjöstedt and the Left Party which could become an historic betrayal of the Swedish resistance to EU.

Unlike in many other European countries – not least in Britain – the resistance against EU in Sweden has from the beginning been an issue for the left and has had a clear anti-capitalist profile. Long live Brexit – now comes Svexit. The opposition against EU has continually state that the European Union is an association for the big capital. Because of that the bourgeois nationalist anti-European sentiment has been marginalized.

But when former critics and opponents of EU abandon the fight against the union – and are demanding renegotiation of the Swedish EU membership, which would reaffirm and cement the membership rather than dissolve it – this at the same time means giving the extreme right Sweden Democrats (SD) an opportunity to increase its support.

In the parliament SD is therefore taking over the resistance against EU and they are filling it with its bourgeois nationalist and racist content, something that the media happily are stoking.

This does not mean that the traditional Swedish opposition to EU should step back because of fear of being confused with SD.

On the contrary, we must be even clearer in our anti-capitalist and internationalist opposition to the EU. Our struggle for Sweden to leave the EU is not a battle to return to no past, it is a decisive battle for the future.

The fight for Svexit is obviously a national issue, a struggle for national independence. But this is not the whole truth, and for a revolutionary workers party as the Communist Party this is just one side of things.

The fight for Svexit is not the least a question of class struggle. There is a revolutionary potential in the resistance against EU.

When the ruling class in Europe pawn their honour and glory to a project that every day becomes more evident in its hostility against the people, this is undermining the bourgeoisie's grip over the working class and the majority of the people.

When the establishments description of reality is increasingly at odds with the reality that people face outside the EU sanctioned metropolises, then there are openings for a policy that wants something else.

Long live Brexit – now comes Svexit!

#Sweden #Brexit #CommunistPartySweden #EU #Europe

The result of the June 23 referendum in the United Kingdom, in which the majority of voters chose to take their country out of the European Union, is a rejection of austerity measures, economic stagnation, and widening social inequalities in British society.

Brexit implies a repudiation of the laws of motion of monopoly capitalism, the aggravation of these by neoliberal economic policy and the political arrogance and economic greed of the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the finance oligarch of both of UK and the EU.

Implications of Brexit

The stunning 52-48 vote in favor of “Brexit,” as the Leave-EU option has come to be known, is mainly based on the widespread nationwide sentiment that the stagnation, unemployment and austerity measures have been generated by the EU's persistent push for neoliberal policies and its overprivileged bureaucracy. In a sense, the Brexit is a spontaneous rebellion against the EU and their main UK partners.

The strongest Brexit bulwarks have been the UK's blighted industrial areas, worst-hit by the economic crisis. The neoliberal regime under EU has reduced big sections of the British working people into low-paid, precariously employed, and outright unemployed workers competing among themselves for reduced social benefits.

These comprise both the proletariat and what is more widely labeled as the precariat (unemployed and underemployed, including more and more white collars from the so-called middle class). They are increasingly unable to enjoy the supposed benefits of continued EU membership such as a wider range of cheap consumer goods, unrestricted movement within Europe, and so on.

The Brexit also reflects to a secondary degree the growing influence of rightwing nationalists, populists and xenophobes, whose mass agitation campaigns have spread hatred and anger against refugees and immigrants in the wake of the inflow of millions of refugees to the EU. Ultra-nationalist and racist sentiments have been generated by the monopoly bourgeoisie to obscure the capitalist roots of the crisis, to inflame a section of the masses against others and cause senseless brutal incidents against refugees and immigrants.

But even on this point, the Brexit arguments for national sovereignty and self-determination resonated widely among the British people who feel all the more dissatisfied by the growing and over privileged EU bureaucracy. To many pro-Brexit voters, exit from EU meant better chances to gain more control over national policy-making and improve the economy.

Such current of thinking is buttressed by the fact that the UK has all along maintained fiscal and financial sovereignty and takes into account the better living conditions of several countries like Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The British financial oligarchy also harbors such thinking as it contraposes London as the financial center of a wider scale to the Frankfurt as the financial center of the EU.

While the voting seems not to have strictly followed class alignments, the polarization once again showed the great class divide between the affluent monopoly bourgeoisie and the impoverished working people. It is this underlying clash of class interests that is expressed outwardly as voting patterns in terms of economic status, educational level, age, residence and ethnicity.

The American and British mainstream media, which reflect the interests of monopoly capitalism, especially of the financial oligarchy, have concentrated only on the pros and cons for British monopoly capitalism during the debate before June 23. Since the resounding Brexit vote, they have focused mainly on the most immediate impacts of Brexit, such as steep drops in the pound and euro, other aftershocks in the financial markets, unexpected complications for the EU labor market, and the seemingly widened floodgates of racist tensions.

What is often obscured are the root causes of the worsening economic and financial crisis. In fact, the proletariat and the rest of the people in the UK are suffering class oppression and exploitation, whether there is Brexit or not. The US has openly expressed for the UK to remain in the UK for the sake of sustaining the US-NATO expansion and pressures on Russia. But the UK has its own distinct internal dynamics despite the intimate Anglo-American links.

On one hand, the UK has always been a hesitant or reluctant member of the EU even during its peak years. The pound sterling has long stood outside the eurozone, symbolic of the long-standing fiscal and financial sovereignty of the British financial oligarchy. This oligarchy has zealously done everything to keep London as a major financial center of global capitalism and pivot point of Anglo-American collaboration.

On the other hand, the factors favoring Brexit have been generated by the ever worsening crisis both of British monopoly capitalism as well as of EU-wide monopoly capitalism, under the auspices of the neoliberal economic policy propagated in Europe and worldwide by the US and UK since Reagan and Thatcher.

The British Left has not been effective in explaining in revolutionary terms to the people that the worsening economic and financial crisis is rooted in the basic laws of capitalism and aggravated at an accelerated rate by neoliberal economic policy, which has been promoted by the US and UK. Racist backlash and the myopic bourgeois media have overwhelmed the obvious fact that the massive inflow of refugees into the EU has been the result of US and NATO wars of aggression, whipped up mainly by the US and UK, in the Middle East and Africa.

The US and UK have been the most vile and violent in unleashing wars of aggression by the US and NATO and have been mainly responsible for the phenomenon of refugees in tens of millions since the repeated wars against Iraq. They have been actively involved the longrunning war in Afghanistan and the wars in the Balkans, Africa, in Libya and Syria They are most culpable for the 65 million refugees that have resulted from the wars.

Consequences of Brexit

What happens after the referendum is still unfolding. Various political forces, still in a state of denial, are calling for a second referendum in the hope of reversing the Brexit. The British and other European oligarchs who favor UK remaining in EU are using the post-Brexit fallout to whip up a “Bregret” trend, an anti-democratic backlash that questions the democratic vote in principle while reasserting the wisdom of the EU techno-bureaucracy, and fears that Brexit could further lead to a breakup of the UK.

British PM David Cameron has chosen to remain for 90 days to try to untangle the political mess, leaving to his successor the decision whether and when to start the formal two-year separation process under Article 50 (the “exit clause”) of the EU treaties, or even to initiate the immediately legislative repeal of some EU obligations. An alternative track entails a more complex and more extended negotiations to define future UK-EU relations. At any rate, the worsening crisis of leadership in both Tory and Labour parties are reflective of a deeper economic and political crisis in the UK.

The ILPS continues to monitor the developments related to Brexit as these directly affect the working people of the UK and Europe in general. Just the same, we call on all ILPS chapters to further study and prepare for its longer-term impacts. The Brexit is among the latest manifestations of the decomposition of British monopoly capitalism and of EU monopoly capitalism. Such process of decomposition is still made less obvious by a working class previously debilitated by social democracy, modern revisionism and neoliberalism.

Considering the major role of the UK in the European economy, its exit from the EU or redefined role can trigger the beginning of further exits by other countries from the EU. Such exits jeopardize further the floundering Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and further worsen the economic and financial crisis of European and global capitalism. Germany can ride on the crisis to loosen or remove US controls resulting from German defeat in World War II and can even favor a European army independent of a US-controlled NATO.

In the still relatively more prosperous countries of Europe, such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, more nationalist and anti-immigrant parties and groups will press for exit from the EU. In countries hard pressed by higher rates of unemployment, stagnation, austerity measures and foreign debt obligations, like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, the people can be led by the Left parties and movements against impositions by their local rulers, monopolies and foreign creditors.

From a proletarian revolutionary viewpoint, it can be said that the tendency of the EU to decompose will result in the eventual weakening of EU and its national components as bulwarks of counterrevolution and aggression. However, proletarian revolutionary parties have yet to effectively lead the education, organization and mass mobilization of the people on the road of revolution.

In many EU countries at the moment, rightwing parties and groups have stood out far more than the Left in responding to the crisis. There are however Left formations which can strive to assert leadership in the face of the crisis conditions that continue to worsen and incite the people to rebel. The working class, youth and people in France, Spain, Greece and Portugal have been among the most determined and military in fighting austerity measures and other neoliberal impositions by the EU and by their respective oligarchies.

In the underdeveloped Third World, the outflow of labor migration and return flow of remittances will begin to constrict as refugees from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia and migrant workers from Eastern Europe and elsewhere compete for shrinking labor markets in EU and UK. More financial bubbles are threatening to burst, aggravating slowdowns, recessions, and unemployment in all parts of the world.

At this point in time, even the IMF and the ruling circles of many countries are aware that the neoliberal economic policy has resulted in stagnation and gross inequality and that the neoconservative policy of aggressive wars have resulted in floods of refugees. But they are paralyzed by their own arrogance and greed and still deny what they perceive.

The worsening crisis of global capitalism and the unraveling of the neoliberal economic policy drives the ILPS to call for all anti-imperialist and democratic forces to move to the front lines and bring the people's struggle forward to greater freedom, democracy, social justice, all-round development and international solidarity against the forces of exploitation, oppression and aggression.

#Netherlands #JoseMariaSison #Brexit #EU #Europe